Whether Google’s latest algorithms are giving you a headache, or you just migrated your website and your ranking was affected, there are a number of mistakes that can affect your SEO performance.
Some are obvious — outdated design and content, too many typos, a slow-loading site — while others require a little more digging.
Luckily, there are simple solutions to many SEO performance problems.
While gathering some of these common issues, we decided to ask our friends and experts over at Orbit Media, a web design and dev agency known for their high-ranking content, what they’ve noticed.
We chatted with Andy Crestodina — Orbit’s widely known co-founder and CMO who literally wrote the book on content marketing — about what he thinks is an often-overlooked tip to maintain best SEO practices. According to Andy, your website’s sitemap plays an even bigger role than you might have known.
First we’ll share his insights, then we’ll explore four more common SEO mistakes, and how to fix them.
1. Targeted Sitemap Keyphrases
Andy Crestodina:
Every keyphrase is a competition and every page is a competitor. So a very common mistake is to not build a keyphrase-focused sitemap.
Every page has the chance to rank.
So if you build a sitemap that includes many pages targeting many phrases of various types of intent, you’ll get better results from search. Remember, Google doesn’t rank websites. It never has. Google ranks web pages. The best websites have all kinds of search-optimized pages.
The best websites have all kinds of search-optimized pages.
Andy Crestodina
Source: How to Make a Sitemap, Orbit Media
What else to keep look out for when optimizing your sitemap:
- Broken links found in sitemap.xml
- Incorrect pages
- Missing sitemaps (“sitemap.xml not found”)
- A link to your sitemap.xml in your robots.txt file
Here Are 4 More Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid
2. Duplicate H1 tags
Your H1 tag is the title of your blog post or landing page, and using more than one H1 tag within your content will confuse search engines. H1 tags mean “this is what the page is about” and when you use more than one H1, there’s no clear indication as to what query you should rank high for. Confused algorithms can’t determine relevance, so your ranking will drop. Review your blog posts and landing pages to ensure that proper H-tag usage is consistent throughout.
Here’s a quick reference:
- There should only be one h1 on each page: your blog post title, product name, and so on.
- Subheadings (H2, H3, etc.) let the algorithm scan the page to quickly understand what the page is about and what other topics are covered.
- Last, you should have multiple subheadings that lend themselves to the structure of your page or post — don’t just use subheadings for design purposes.
Need help? Contact us for a site audit.
3. Missing meta descriptions
Accurate Meta tag information for each landing page and for products in your catalog are crucial to ranking for the right search engine query.
Although meta descriptions are not considered a direct ranking factor, they can indirectly influence your click-through rate, which is a big part of what determines rank.
Plus, Google often uses helpful, accurate descriptions in search engine results pages. The more accurate your meta description, the better the chance you’ll reach users directly. It should tell the user what value they’ll gain by clicking on your link.
If you have a ton of products in your catalog, updating meta descriptions on each can be time consuming process. Check to see if your site admin offers the option to upload descriptions in a csv for and import all at once.
When writing meta descriptions, aim for around 150-160 characters of unique text. Above all, meta descriptions should be informative and accurate to the content it’s describing.
4. Broken links and images
A good mix of internal and external links within a blog post can enhance your SEO. However, if you change the URL on an internal link, you’ll need to recall where else that URL might be linked within your site.
It’s a little more difficult to track external link changes, but with the use of references like Ahrefs you can keep tabs on any broken links on your site and where they’re located, and then determine how to fix them.
Keep an eye out for these top SEO mistakes:
- Broken internal links
- Broken external links
- Nofollow attributes in external links
- Pages with only one internal link
- Page Crawl Depths of more than 3 clicks
- Broken images. An image may be broken when its URL contains an error or when a file no longer exists.
5. 4xx errors
When a 4xx code (401, 402, etc) shows up after clicking a link, it means that the page is broken and cannot be reached, or can’t be reached because something is blocking a crawler.
These are important to recognize because pages that return a 4xx status code are not indexed properly in Google’s search results.
All 4xx errors, except 429, tell search engines that the content doesn’t exist. The 429 status code means that Google can’t access a URL because the server is overloaded.
4xx errors are different from 5xx (server errors), which prompt Google to temporarily slow down with crawling. These should still be carefully watched because URLS that continue to bring up a 5xx status will eventually be dropped from indexing.
A quick reference from Google’s developer support site:
Learn more about how to directly resolve these issues here.
What else can you do to positively impact your SEO?
Have Your SEO Audited
There are many ways you can make your website attractive to customers, but what can you do to make it appealing to the almighty algorithm by avoiding SEO mistakes in the first place?
Content is king, and the king needs a good support structure. An in-depth Shopify SEO audit reviews competitor benchmarking, keyword research data, site architecture, and linking structure.
A comprehensive SEO audit will pinpoint weaknesses to your current strategy and analysis methods. Once corrected, your site can climb higher in search engine rankings.
Contact us today to schedule an SEO audit or strategy session.
Gentian, CSO and co-founder of Shero Commerce, guides the company and client digital strategies. He's an expert in technical SEO, Inbound Marketing, and eCommerce strategy.
